Speaking solely to CNBC-TV18, ThatTai said these elements are not negotiable for successful deployment of AI-powered agents for customers and internal functions. “When we started this journey, trust was our number one priority,” he said, adding that agents must be safe, access to the right data and be integrated into their business workflows.
The company is also increasing new innovations in three key areas: Templates to simplify adoption, observability to track agent performance, and further improvements in interoperability. “We're launching hundreds of industry templates and innovating in how AI can help build and improve agents,” he said.
ThiTai emphasized that customer engagement and iteration play a major role in shaping the AgentForce roadmap. Examples include Lennar, which uses AI agents for SMS-based lead generation, and Opentable, which deploys agents for restaurants and diner services. “We see customers engage at every stage. Their feedback has a direct impact on the evolution of tools and capabilities,” he added.
Below is an excerpt from the interview.
Q: Marc Benioff has made it very clear that he thinks AI agents will be a game changer. This makes it very clear that digital labor is moving forward, not only will it increase productivity, but will also increase global GDP significantly. That's the bet. How is it working?
Thattai: We believe that the future workforce will become a hybrid workforce. Agent Technology believes that all future customers and all business functions have reached the point where they can work together to effectively manage the workforce, including humans and agents.
We have seen the enormous pace of innovation over the last few years, starting with Consumer LLMS. At Salesforce, we really focus on how to make sure this technology is ready for your company. We also believe that making it enterprise-ready will fundamentally change every customer experience and every employee experience. It's a bold vision for the future. We're very excited about it and I think Salesforce has an important role to play.
Q: What do you look at when it comes to adoption? What kind of traction and momentum do you really have today?
Thattai: We see real activity and momentum from our full clients. Today, thousands of customers are experimenting with AgentForce. AgentForce has reached a $100 million ARR, making Salesforce the fastest growing product to date.
Customers are driving recruitment and driving technology at various stages of maturity. A great example in the US is starting to use B2B-side agents, start using restaurant partners on the face, expanding to serve diners, creating end-to-end customer lifecycle experiences.
We see customers experimenting in different patterns. Some will adopt this in the full lifecycle of customer-facing lifecycle (some will adopt it in the full lifecycle of marketing, sales, customer service, etc., while others will focus on increasing productivity and driving efficiency among employees. AgentForce is built to satisfy this wide range of use cases and sees deep recruitment and strong motivation from customers to build a better experience.
Q: With momentum increasing and potentially accelerating, what will this $100 million ARR grow over the next few years? What are your aspirations and ambitions? What kind of headroom do you see for growth?
Thattai: When you think about the scope of the digital workforce, it's a very large business. We are talking about global companies. Our focus now is at every stage of our clients' success. That's where we spend most of our time.
This is a new category that has emerged over the past 6-8 months. We believe this defines how the workforce evolves. What really matters for now is that it helps customers drive the right results, do it in a reliable and secure way, and ensure that the right data and business processes are available to support it.
We believe this is an important pathway to unlocking the full potential of this technology.
Q: As a creator of the category, you are building a market and setting up a template for how this is used and adopted. What are the important issues you are looking at? One of the big factors people are talking about is interoperability. How do you see that?
ThatTai: When building agent technology, you will see three important things that customers have to do:
First, they need to trust that their agents are safe, manage their data accurately, and provide a reliable experience both for customers and inside. When we began this generative journey a few years ago, trust was our number one priority. For 25 years, it was Salesforce's number one value and was less important than this agent's world.
Second, the agent must have access to the correct data. This is an important area of working closely with our customers. Proper data protection is active within Salesforce and available to agents. That's where a trip using the data cloud comes into play.
Third, focus on the customer's business processes. Salesforce already plays a key role in the sales, service and marketing processes, and is deeply embedded in the driving outcomes.
Once these basics are in place, consider managing your agents. Induces and improves agent performance and helps it improve over time.
And finally, you arrive at the interoperability challenges you mentioned. Humans naturally work beyond business functions and even across the enterprise. An interoperability layer is important for agents to do the same. We've invested a lot in this and we'll talk more about it this week. How can agents interoperate to complete tasks across an ecosystem of data and tools?
Q: What's new now? What do you prioritize and what should we expect?
Thattai: There will be a lot of innovation in all of these areas. First, on the build side, we'll be introducing hundreds of industry templates and get started easily. They are also innovating how AI can help build agents and continue to improve their experience.
The second is observability. You know your agents are performing as intended. We invest in tools that improve performance and deliver engineered results for our agents.
Third, we focus on interoperability. Agent supply can work across organizational boundaries and in other systems. Since a single task often spans many tools, this interoperability layer is important and we are very excited about the investment we are making there.
Q: Speaking of investments, do you think you need to invest in the future?
Thattai: The big advantage we have with Salesforce is our platform. We are built over 25 years of highly scalable, safe and robust foundation. At its core, the platform guarantees privacy and trust for any interaction and is already well connected to other data systems and tools. AgentForce inherits all of these features.
There is already an incredible innovation that has led to the Agent Force. It is a tool for building buildings, observations, and now for agent interoperability agents across complex architectures.
You can see customers engaged at every stage. For example, Lennar uses an agent to generate reads for SMS. Their next step is observability and management. Therefore, we partner closely with them to improve our testing and analytical tools.
In more complex setups (such as Opentable), service agents run within the ecosystem of tools used by OpenTable. These companies will immediately ask how agents work with these tools. That's where trustworthy, contextual, and authenticated interoperability features begin to be deployed.
Watch the video of the entire conversation.
